By admin 
The attorney general is California’s top cop, responsible for enforcing all of the state’s laws.
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Under Xavier Becerra and now incumbent Rob Bonta, the office has filed hundreds of lawsuits against the White House, as the Trump administration has targeted California’s discrimination, housing, business and climate laws.
Compared to other races, like governor, the contest for attorney general has attracted far less attention, even as its predecessors, like Kamala Harris, have gone on to higher office. After briefly considering a run for governor, Bonta opted to run for a second, four-year term.
He and Republican nominee Michael Gates advanced out of the June 2 primary, and will face each other again in the Nov. 3 election.
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Who is Rob Bonta?
Bonta, the Filipino-born son of Christian missionaries, first became a deputy city attorney in 2003 in San Francisco after stints as a private litigator and as a clerk for a federal judge in Connecticut.
He became an Alameda City council member in 2010, and two years later, won an East Bay-area Assembly seat as a Democrat. In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed him attorney general when Becerra left to join the Biden administration.
Bonta, 54, went on to win his first full term in 2022. Since President Donald Trump reentered the White House in 2024, Bonta has filed an average of one lawsuit a week against the White House. The first week Trump took office, California was one of 25 states that sued over his executive order banning birthright citizenship; the effort succeeded in June after the Supreme Court intervened.
Bonta has also turned his office’s attention towards tech companies like Meta, which recently agreed to pay $17 billion and overhaul how children interact with its platforms.
Bonta has also become the face of an ongoing legal effort to block a Warner Brothers-Paramount merger that he argues will unfairly consolidate Hollywood into the hands of a few owners.
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He is married to Assemblymember Mia Bonta, D-Alameda, who won his seat in a special election after he became attorney general. The couple live in Alameda and have three children. One of them, Reina Bonta, is a professional soccer player who plays for the Philippines women’s national team.
Who is Michael Gates?
Prior to seeking the attorney general’s office, Gates was best known as the city attorney of Huntington Beach, a conservative enclave in Orange County that defied state COVID mandates and passed restrictive laws around voter identification and housing.
Gates served as city attorney for a decade, after working in the private sector. He briefly served in the Trump administration as a deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division between 2024 and 2025.
As city attorney, he helped establish Huntington Beach’s in-house community prosecutor program, which prosecuted petty crime cases like public drunkenness and trespassing instead of relying on county-level district attorneys, to deter low-level offenses.
Gates told the Daily Pilot in 2019 that the program “exceeded expectations,” and recouped the city at least $85,000 in fines, according to data from that time.
He later returned to Huntington Beach government, before leaving again to run for attorney general. Gates is part of the California Republican Party’s “Victory ‘26” slate. At a June press conference, he promised to work with other Republican state candidates like Sonja Shaw, who is running for superintendent of public instruction, to overturn state anti-discrimination laws and break the Democrats’ decade-long hold on the Legislature and governor’s office.
Gates, 51, is a married father of five who lives in Huntington Beach, according to his website. He earned his undergraduate degree from Pepperdine University and his law degree from Chapman University, according to the State Bar of California.
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